What's going on is that I have a few other things to do. Like writing essays and dealing with 58 (so far) startups we've invested in. Since the main advantage of implementing search would be to save people from going all the way to Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+Readmo...), it's not a huge priority.
An example: I'm running a startup from Melbourne Australia and read an interesting comment from someone in the same boat, including details of a meetup type event, a week ago.
I didn't bookmark it because I didn't expect it would be hard to find. But now I can't find it at all.
The poster mentioned Melbourne was the 'artichoke end of the world'. Googling for 'artichoke' on news.yccombinator.com has no results. How frequently does Google spider most sites anyway?
"... The poster mentioned Melbourne was the 'artichoke end of the world'. Googling for 'artichoke' on news.yccombinator.com has no results. How frequently does Google spider most sites anyway? ..."
Yeah the search here sucks. My attempt at finding stuff is to
A) save it on my blog so I have the original copy I can then search via google
Look one way to get around it is for someone to spider the site and link back (damn I lost the link .... someone has a search site where???), another is to get a google box for what USD$5K and integrate google search. As the site grows, search is becoming important for historical articles, phrases or people who you want to ascribe a comment. Guess this is what's meant by users loving new features. I'm just glad there is somewhere for stuff like this to be discussed. So while search sucks, it's not integral, for me at least.
I had problems finding stories from before the switch to putting all comments and news stories on item?id=x, because a search would go to a broken link. But the object numbers stayed the same, so if you find a story with a broken link, you can just switch comment?id=x to item?id=x.
"... I had problems finding stories from before the switch to putting all comments and news stories on item?id=x, because a search would go to a broken link. ..."
Deleted node probably. Means it's been deleted or removed by user and/or was probably edited because it was "spammish" or poor quality in nature.
"... so if you find a story with a broken link, you can just switch comment?id=x to item?id=x. ..."
This one I noted after some changes in the code probably about 2 months after I started using it. I save all my posts and the links started breaking (link checking). The term was changed from 'comment' to 'item' (guessing) because it was shorter.
Before the update, items were broken down into 'comment' and 'link' (not sure if link was the object, it might have been news) but their ID numbers didn't overlap so I assume PG combined them because their was no reason not to, except for breaking old links.
The links I was trying to find weren't actually deleted, I just wasn't finding them because I only recently figured out I need to change the link to 'item?id='
"... tems were broken down into 'comment' and 'link' (not sure if link was the object, it might have been news) but their ID numbers didn't overlap so I assume PG combined them because their was no reason not to, except for breaking old links. ..."
Thanks for that explanation. Hadn't taken the time to work this out.
"... By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages ..." ~ http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-nofollow#Specification_2005...
Damn I just thought of one problem though. "Rel=nofollow" on low priority submissions means google will have low(er) priority search? Is that right?
I don't doubt that you have many other things on your plate but surely there is someone at YC that could do this. Or if nothing else take axod's comment and open it up so that someone on here can do it for you.
Update - Make it part of the Winter YC application. Post the data we need to know and let people write the code for you.
